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The Last Man: A Critical Analysis of Plagues Creating Community
Katie Lacayo, Whitworth University
As the plague begins to form and spread in Mary Shelley’s The Last Man, the private sectors of life are
interrupted. The public sphere is the only area in which people are allowed to live, and the reliance upon mankind becomes far greater than individual interest. Because of disease, a physical, uncontrolled contamination of the body, the community is forced to reconcile with internal affairs toward the entire community. Shelley suggests through her passages that security, which is found in an unchanging community, is disrupted by conflict. This conflict reveals the mistrust of those perceived as the other, as well as the self-protection that is natural within internal or societal controversy. Through a shift in the paradigm—the emergence of the plague—Shelley then changes the motivation of her characters by depicting the vulnerability that individuals must entrust to others in order to survive and live well and wholly in the novel, despite the heightened conflict that the plague brings. The Last Man ultimately demonstrates vulnerability within human community and how disease breaks apart the social constructs of privacy, individuality, and strength to reveal a much more human view of the other.
Throughout the narrative, the reader is confronted with interpersonal conflicts that seem, at first glance,
to detract from the novel. The beginning of the novel especially focuses on multiple love triangles, squares, and polygons, and the plague does not enter the lives of the characters until the second half of the book. While it may at first appear that Shelley is obsessed with the relational problems of her characters, sparked by Romanticism, the author makes a smart and careful choice to include these relationships and dwell in them. Through these relationships, the reader is able to understand the private sphere of each individual’s life and the preexisting desire for individuality and self-preservation.
Shelley’s characters, Perdita and Raymond, reveal their selfish ideologies through an argument in the
